Gunung Agung

Ok... so we dreamed of rats and stuff.

On Sunday, July 29 Ali went surfing early in the morning and Johanna, Nick, and I went for a morning walk. I had walked up the road that has all the tourist restaurants and money changers and all that jazz. You were hassled at every corner. You feel bad for the locals sometimes.

There have been two (2002,2005) extremist Islamic bombings in Kuta, Bali in the last few years. I haven't read those Wikipedia links but from what I gather they had targeted the loud, obnoxious nightclubs of the area. A lot of the activities that take place in those places don't really jive with the more reserved views of the fundamentalists... Ok fine, the place got bombed. What's the effect? the Bali tourist industry is shattered. There's a large infrastructure that was built and it's not really being used to its full potential. Even in high season tons of tourist restaurants and hotels are sitting nearly empty. Tourists get scared by the bombings... however if you just get out of the Kuta area to some precious little village on the coast or nestled in the mountains your main fear should probably be a traffic accident. If you want to go party and drink then maybe Bali isn't the place, but for the true treasures of the island... I feel like there's no elevated risk.

I digress...

Johanna and Nick brought travelers checks and no ATM card so they needed to change some of those to the local Rupiah before too long. We stopped by a money changer who was advertising a good rate (9,290 Rupiah to 1 USD)... his friend who was running the store gave him a slight kick to the side when we walked in. He was passed out in the bottom rung of a shelf in the corner. Wiping the sleep from his eyes, he told us that he did accept travelers checks and asked how much we might want to change. $300 seemed like a good number so he typed 9,290 * 300 into the calculator and got 24,570. Uhm... a quick beck of the envelope calculation yields 3 * 9 = 27... WTF?? Nick said he saw him hold down the '=' key down instead of just tapping it. We called him out on the incorrect number and he typed it in again. 2,787,000. OK, that jives.

So he starts to count out money... in 20,000 Rupiah notes. That's like 140 bills. When he got halfway through the first $100 the stack was already ridiculously high. We had to stop him and ask if her had bigger bills. No... only 20,000's. Fine, let's just do $100 then.

He started counting again in sets of 5. You could hear his hands slide the bills... flip-flip-flip-flip-flip flip-flip-flip-flip-flip flip-flip-flip-flip-flip flip-flip-flip-flip-flip flip-flip-flip-flip-flip flip-flip-flip-flip flip-flip-flip-flip-flip flip-flip-flip-flip-flip.... HOLD ON.... wait a minute... the rhythm was off in one of those. Sure enough, one of the sets only had 4 bills in it. Busted again. Poor guy... he had just woken up.

So we pay attention as he recounts all the money, then we coulnt it. We eventually give him 11,000 change so that he can just give us a set of 20,000. Ok, good almost done. We count the money again and come up short. He quickly yields the 20,000 hat he had slid under his counter when we were not quite looking. Busted again. Poor guy. We got the poated rate from him and he tried every trick short of counterfeit money to try to sucker us.

Would it have been better for us to walk when we saw that the calculator was rigged, or was it right to hold him to his rate and monitor him at every step? Poor guy. Bad day. He probably took a decent loss on the deal.

After that ordeal we wandered down an alley from the touristy street and finally found some serenity. Little temples are nestled everywhere. People smile. Kids run around playing. It was reassuring to finally happen upon a non-tourist victimizing scene.

Then we walked up the street with a bunch of shops trying to get to the street where all the Sarong shops are.... turns out they were all closed on Sunday so we settled for some half-hour massages at Cecilia's Spa and wandered back to meet Ali who had had a tough day trying to surf out at the reef. The waves were way too much for a beginner.

Johanna and I went for the second time to meet our dad, Mandi, at the Dhyana Pura Hotel next door. He and his wife Hilde arrived in a tired, exhausted state. They were traveling with their good friends Joachim and Mechthild. We quickly greeted them and let them get settled in. "Come get us for dinner, yeah?" We hung around on a balcony and Nick taught us to play some poker until we were hailed to get some food. Dinner was mellow. They were zoinked from the flight. There was live music at the Dhyana Pura restaurant,.. it was terrible. A guy playing keyboard and a Lady singer singing sappy classic rock covers. Loungey music dribble smack. We had a good laugh at it.

Monday, July 30 was the day we left for Gunung Agung, the 3,142 meter volcano on Bali. We got up at 7am and Johanna led us through some stretches and Yoga and various other warm-ups. A nice way to start the day. One last fruit, granola, and yogurt breakfast, a quick trip to the ATM, and we were off to the north side of the island so start our ascent. We had to stop by a bank along the way so that Johanna and Nick could cash in more travelers checks... it cost us some time. Nothing tragic though. We stopped by the M & G Trecking Headquarters to pick up supplies including water, tents, sleeping mats, food, and various other goods.

We pulled into a small village with the car and the guide, Mudi, started to unpack the gear and round up the porters, Wayan and Wayan. Balinese are often named after their birth order resulting in either Wayan, Made, Nyoman, or Ketut. These guys carried big baskets of gear attached to either end of a bamboo pole they they laid over their shoulder. They had common things. We all carried our own personal items like clothes and toothbrushes and things. We started the ascent at 300 meters 1t 4:30 pm and climbed through long grass and lave washes for about 4 hours before we reached the campsite. I think the plan was to get there earlier, but given our bank adventures that day we were quite delayed. We had rice, steamed veggies, and chicken for dinner. Not my normal camping food but I'll eat it. They carried it up in these steel pots. Oh well. Four of us crammed into a large tent and Mudi, Wayan, and Wayan took the other tent. They carried one more that we never ended up using. Thank you for the pipe, Tim, it was good smokin', sitting on the side of the mountain in the moonlight.

On Tuesday, July 31 planned to get up at 2:30 in the morning but ended up doing 3:30. Ali had left her Blackberry phone set to Jakarta time and the alarm was way delayed. I'm not sure if Mudi was too timid to wake us up for overslept as well. Generally you'd get to the peak at sunrise at 6:20 but we watched it from a spot maybe an hour from the top. It was beautiful, with the sun rising just to the left of Lombok's Gunung Rinjani. Soon we were at the peak, peering down into the crater below and being fed Ginseng Coffee and hard boiled eggs. Ali had cell phone reception so we made a few calls from the top. "Guess where we are?"

The descent was slow. It was a lot harder going down the skree at the top and a lot harder to find your way down the steep sections of tall grass. A little while after we left the top we also ran out of water. We could have rationed better had we known about how much water there was... I guess we assumed that there was enough in the back holes of the porters' bags... guess not. So we spent 3 hours descending without a drink. They did stash 3 liters part of the way down so we were not completely screwed but we were definitely starting to feel a bit dehydrated by the time we got there. I had some oral re-hydration salts in my first aid kit. They were meant for diarrhea but would basically work just like salt pills or Gatorade in a pinch when you don't have any food and no salt to help your body get hydrated.

We finally made it to the bottom. Knees were shaky. Toenails were blue. They had cold soda waiting for us. I haven't had a soda in so long. Orangina's about the closest thing. I devoured a Sprite in no time at all. We were taken to a restaurant to have dinner and then got a ride to the Hidden Paradise Cottages in Lipah, near Amed on the northwest Bali coast.

Ali had a flight back to Jakarta at 8:30 and there was no way she was going to make that. She tried to get flights in the morning and finally was able to get a business class seat. We tired to all pile into a room at the Hidden Paradise and they called us on it so Ali caught a 2 hours ride back to the Airport to try to catch one of that evening's delayed 10pm flights. It's a good thing Ali had her cell phone. It would have been so much harder to take care of all this otherwise.

We passed out hard at Hidden Paradise. Didn't even bust into the beer in the mini-bar fridge. Too tired.

(Ok, what am I now,... 9 days behind... hopefully I can use Ali's laptop tonight after the others go to sleep and try to get caught up a little more and intersperse some photos into all this)